Eighty-Five from the Archive: Rebecca West

This year is The New Yorker’s eighty-fifth anniversary. To celebrate, over eighty-five weekdays, we will turn a spotlight on a notable article, story, or poem from the magazine’s history. The issue containing that day’s selected piece will be made freely available in our digital archive and will remain open until the next day’s selection is posted.

In May of 1947, Rebecca West travelled to Greenville, South Carolina, to report on the trial of thirty-one white men who were accused of carrying out the lynching of Willie Earle, a black man who’d been arrested four months earlier for the stabbing of a white taxi-driver. West, who contributed twenty-two pieces to The New Yorker between 1940 and 1959, was no stranger to bearing witness to horrific crimes, having written extensively on the Nuremberg trials the previous year. Her visceral piece on the Greenville trial peeled back the mask of nineteen-forties Southern gentility to reveal the rougher, darker truths about the men who had participated in the crime and the town that acquitted them:

There could be no more pathetic scene than these taxi-drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. For an hour or two, the trial had built up in them that sense of law which is as necessary to man as bread and water and a roof. They had known killing for what it is: a hideousness that begets hideousness. They had seen that the most generous impulse, not subjected to the law, may engender a shameful deed. For indeed they were sick at heart when what had happened at the slaughter-pen was described in open court. But they had been saved from the electric chair and from prison by men who had conducted their defense without taking a minute off to state or imply that even if a man is a murderer one must not murder him and that murder is foul. These people had been plunged back into chaos.

Although the defendants were all acquitted, West believed that the trial left such a disquieting mark on the town that “wickedness itself had been aware of the slowing of its pulse.” In one masterful stroke in the piece, she describes the tattooed hands of one of the defendants:

The man held [his hands] out proudly. On the four fingers of his left hand he had tattooed, just above the knuckles, the letters “L-O-V-E.” And on the four fingers of his right hand he had the letters “H-A-T-E.” Then he flipped up the thumbs. “T” was on the left thumb, “O” was on the right. “Love to hate,” he read. He had done it himself, he said; he had a tattooing outfit. The more you washed the letters, the brighter they got.